Tag Archives: meet our students

In July 2013 I attended an “International Summer School” run by Pink Therapy? Why?

Jo Russell

I was a therapist of 10 years’ experience. I had trained as a therapist while living ‘by faith’ as a Christian Missionary on a faith-based diploma course. We had one day on ‘talking about sex with clients’. That was it. Nothing on LGBT ‘issues’. I didn’t even know what Q meant. By 2013 being a therapist had changed me and I was no longer a missionary, although I hadn’t walked away from my faith. In supervision I recognised that I could no longer excuse my ignorance, I needed to confront myself.

And that is something I like about myself: when I make a decision I go all the way. Where would my ignorance be most confronted? Where would I be most confronted? Google directed me to Pink Therapy (I never did like the colour pink), and I began to explore training possibilities. London was too far away for short workshops (I live in Glasgow), but a week… A week would give me the opportunity to learn, not just to catch a glimpse of something, to build new connections.

The International part of Summer School was significant for me. That aspect of diversity I was comfortable with. I had travelled the world. I was accustomed to different cultures and languages; I felt at home with them. Perhaps that helped me to feel less defensive, more open to new things?

I had to raise the money; friends and family helped. But that week was career changing. It was life changing. I still work in private practice, and 90% of my clients have stories of diversity in gender, relational styles or sexuality. I am immensely grateful for the opportunity I was afforded, and for those who believed in me, accepted me, and allowed me to move from where I was, without pressure.

Since then I have found the confidence to do more than I believed possible. I completed the 2 year Pink Therapy Post-graduate diploma in working with gender, sexual and relational diversity, and am now part of the faculty for the Foundation Certificate course. I still attend (and hopefully contribute to) Pink Therapy conferences, and recently presented a paper for the Psychology of Sexualities section of the British Psychological Society. Since Pink therapy is London-based, and since the experience of being GSRD north of the border is different, I have started a group (www.rainbowtherapyscotland.org.uk) which meets as a peer-led networking and CPD opportunity for those working therapeutically in a non-pathologising way with GSRD clients. We will have our first national conference in May 2019.

Below are some extracts of my journal, written during That Week. They are unaltered, and I hope they give a flavour of my experience of summer school.

Day One: “I realised just how cloistered I have been and in some ways how naive and inexperienced I am. But during the course of the day I noticed a subtle change in myself, reminiscent of my first trip to Central Asia. “They” went from being labels, categories, types to being “thou” in the old use of the word, someone I know, respect, and identify with, a fellow human being with a whole lifetime of a story to tell, and with whom I have far more in common than I have different.”

Day Two: “If day 1 felt rich, day 2 stirred a much deeper personal commitment to engage in this work therapeutically, and an emotional response to those who have lived through deeper and more scarring experiences than I could have imagined. May God be my helper.”

Day Three: “This week is changing me on the inside. It seems to me that as humans we can feel intimidated by the things we know little about or have little experience of. The unknown can be scary; at the same time we feel drawn to it and hold back from it. We need not fear. Human is human; it just may sound different on the outside.”

Day Four: “The diversity within the group of life experience and of background and personality added to rather than strained the dynamic. We were all able to listen to each other and so no-one felt constrained to shout over any group consensus to make their individual voice heard.”

Day Five: “To all of you who made it possible for me to be here, please know that not only am I grateful to you for your generosity, but I hope my future clients will also be grateful without knowing it. You are investing in them as well as me. Thank you for believing in me and valuing them!”

I am a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist from Finland. When I attended the summer school back in 2013 I was on my third year of my (four years) Training of cognitive-integrative psychotherapy. I learned so much, something that was not included at all in my own psychotherapy training! After the summer school I started writing my diploma work ”GSRD therapy in cognitive-integrative psychotherapy”. Based on this text, I later expanded it into a booklet which was (and still is) the only one written in Finnish language on this very topic. It has been so rewarding to hear from clinicians that the booklet has been helpful and they have learned a lot from it. After the Training ofcognitive-integrative psychotherapy I took a one year Training of couples therapy and wrote another diploma work: ”GSRD therapy in couples and relationships psychotherapy”.

Together with the booklet I introduced seminars intended for psychologists, psychotherapists and psychiatrists and started running these basically around the country. Not only private clinicians have been interested but also the public healthcare sector organizations. For example, next spring I am one of the invited speakers in a seminar organized by Helsinki university hospital. I am also trying to make the organizers of Finnish psychotherapy trainings interested in making GSRDT topics part of the four year psychotherapy training programmes organized in this country – just one day would be great! In the spring of 2019 it is going to happen the first time when my seminar day will be part of Solution-focused therapytraining. I am so excited about this! Earlier, my seminar day was already a part of a couples therapy training organized in my hometown Turku.

At the moment I am taking a 2,5 years Training of trainer and supervisor of cognitive-integrative psychotherapy, which means that after this I can lead psychotherapy trainings organized by the Finnish universities. Yet another diploma work, including research, is on the way – you can guess the topic! After this training I can have so much more influence in what is included in psychotherapy trainings offered.

What I learned in the 2013 summer school has of course given me so much as a clinician and helped me to be a better, more skilful psychotherapist. I can also remember the summer as a period of deep personal growth, figuring out who am I as a psychotherapist and what it means to be a gay psychotherapist. Naturally, these are questions I have also worked through in my own personal psychotherapy, am still doing that, and most probably always will in my own mind. After all, it is a never ending journey! Without all that I learned in the summer school and the process it started in my mind, I think I would never have made it this far, would not have been able to learn so much about myself, too! And most importantly, without the summer shool’s teachings, I clearly would have been less helpful for my patients.